For more than two years, Alberta game farmers have mounted an
intensive lobby to legalize one of their primary markets--penned
shooting operations.

The Alberta government had largely refused comment, despite its
long promotion of the industry. That ended this month when Premier
Ralph Klein said: "I find it abhorrent. . . . I just find it inhumane
to have elk or wild animals penned and then people being allowed to
shoot them."

Premier Klein's revulsion at the concept of "Bambi in a barrel"
may have been news, but it misses the real issue, the potentially
devastating effect of game farms on wildlife.

Similarly, Korea's ban on velvet antler imports because of CWD
(chronic wasting disease) on North American game farms was grim news
to the industry. Velvet, sold as an aphrodisiac and traditional
remedy, is game farming's other main product. CWD was later confirmed
in elk imported into Korea from Saskatchewan, reinforcing the
legitimacy of their concern.

CWD is a sister disease to mad-cow disease, and this family of
TSEs (transmissible spongiform encephalopathies) are chronic,
untestable, untreatable and always fatal. Chronic wasting disease has
now been confirmed on game farms across North America.

The costs of the epidemic are into the hundreds of millions and
climbing. More important, the disease has not been contained and is
spreading to wildlife. In fact, our wildlife is facing its greatest
crisis in decades. Any hope of solving it means focusing on the
cause: privatizing, domesticating and commercializing wildlife.

Game farming, by its very nature, fosters and spreads diseases,
parasites, genetic pollution and poaching. It denies wildlife their
habitat, and it contradicts the most basic tenets of wildlife
conservation and resource economics.

The true scope of this crisis emerges only with perspective and
context: Wildlife across North America had been all but exterminated
by 1900. Bison, antelope, elk, deer, predators, song birds, shore
birds and migratory birds had been decimated.

Thankfully, our governments accepted their responsibility; they
identified commercial trafficking as the fundamental source of the
problem, and they banned it. A continental effort over 80 years has
seen this precious public resource restored--an achievement that
stands as one of the greatest environmental successes in history.

We defeated this "tragedy of the commons" by making wildlife
valuable only when alive. The new triumph of the commons resulted in
wildlife-related industries--such as camping, hunting, fishing and
wildlife-watching--which now generate $150-billion annually.

Game ranching requires a deliberate and complete reversal in
direction and purpose--to establish, develop and promote markets and
trafficking in private and dead wildlife. Worse, it seeks to
domesticate it.

Domestication of wildlife significantly increases exposure and
stress, which fosters and spreads disease. Over many centuries,
cattle, sheep, pigs and other domestics have become extremely disease
hardy. Scientists knew that bringing wildlife into intensive exposure
to such diseases, and then transporting them across the continent,
would build disease bridges into the wild--through fences, via
escapes, and when wildlife enters game farms for feed or sex.

An epidemic of TB on game farms across Canada in the 1990s spread
to cattle, pigs and people. A number of deer and at least 20 elk
remain missing from infected or quarantined game farms. The outbreak
not only cost taxpayers tens of millions, it cost all of Canada
TB-free status, valued by Agriculture Canada at $1-billion. People
were alarmed at the news but they missed the cause. And the crisis
has only gotten worse.

In addition to the recent confirmation of CWD in Alberta, more
infected game farm herds have been found in Saskatchewan, where 8,000
animals have already been destroyed. Officials are scrambling because
the new infections are supposedly unrelated to the relentless series
of outbreaks that began in 1996. At least 227 elk have proven to be
diseased on more than 40 game farms; the disease has been found
outside the fences in two mule deer.

Chronic wasting disease has also been found on game farms in South
Dakota, Oklahoma, Montana, Colorado, Kansas and Nebraska, where
authorities were stunned to find it in 51 per cent of 154 captive
whitetail deer. Just one of several CWD-infected game farms in
Colorado shipped 400 exposed elk to 15 states. Colorado's governor is
voicing concern over the threat to Colorado's multibillion-dollar
wildlife economy.

Wisconsin, with some of the highest concentrations of deer in
North America, has found CWD in 14 whitetail deer in the wild, and
the state intends to test up to 15,000 deer this fall.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman has declared a "state of
emergency" regarding CWD, but this is damage control that misses the
real issue.

Game farming presents an unprecedented threat to wildlife,
agriculture, our economies, and potentially to human health. There is
no confirmed case of CWD infecting a human (it's called
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in people). We hope that the species
barrier will prevent people from being infected, along with the fact
that the most likely source of infection (brains, spinal chord,
blood, lymphatic glands, rumen and intestines) are not typically
eaten from venison (unlike the case with beef in Britain).

But in vitro experiments demonstrate that CWD and BSE (bovine
spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow disease) prions transform
healthy human prions at the same rate. And in Britain, over 100
people have now died of variant CJD from eating BSE-infected beef.

Despite public pleas from the time CWD was first confirmed on game
farms in 1996, antler velvet has continued to be sold for human
consumption. Industry statements that the heat of drying velvet would
sterilize it were misleading. Prions are extremely resilient, and
have remained infectious after being reduced to ash at 600 C. Even
when it was confirmed that velvet was sold from animals proven
diseased, neither the industry nor government made any attempt to
recall it, or even warn customers.

Containing this disaster requires immediate action. We need a
national moratorium on game farming, an immediate suspension on the
movement or sale of all game farm related products, and a judicial
inquiry to establish the extent of the problem and how it happened.

This will allow us to examine the entire issue of privatizing and
commercializing wildlife in a comprehensive "environmental assessment
with a public review," as has been promised by Prime Minister Jean
Chretien.

Darrel Rowledge is director of the Alliance for Public Wildlife,
Valerius Geist is professor emeritus and former head of environmental
science at the University of Calgary, and Jim Fulton is executive
director of the David Suzuki Foundation.

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